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If you have ever had an experience that took you beyond the familiar
five-sensory, physical perspective most of us take for granted as reality -- examples
being near-death or out-of-body experience, afterdeath communication with a
loved one, mystical experience, enhanced or supersensory awareness of the
otherwise consensual world about you, reincarnation or pre-birth memory,
the distinct impression of a spiritual presence with you, or even déjà
vu or a psychic premonition -- then you will instantly relate to what this
website is about. Especially,
insofar as your life becomes much more meaningful and
purposeful, as a result.
You might feel as if a whole new dimension has been added to your worldview, or
that you are now living out of a previously unglimpsed, yet miraculous
and sustained clarity that has changed your life. Maybe
you become directly aware of who and what you are as a spirit being
temporarily in a physical body and not a 'merely' human being aspiring to be
more spiritual. In any case, you will notice something within your core
self has shifted in an extremely positive and freeing way as a result of the
process of coming to terms with your Experience/s. Such
moments can so enrich and enlarge your sense of reality, that earthly
existence may never quite look the same again.
Ahhh-TheLight.com and another website [mentioned in PART II below] bring into
sharp relief several major points about such events, starting with the impact
these types of encounters and the ensuing life-long process to integrate them can have on individual Experiencers' lives.
Much research over the last 40 years and the very lives of
Experiencers themselves demonstrate that when Experiencers trust
their experiences and find value, meaning and purpose in them, they
experience a consciousness shift toward a more altruistic, accepting,
decidedly positive outlook on life. This influence spills over into
their communities because of their increasing social and ecological
concerns and often impels them toward a more proactive role in these
regards.
On these sites, in honor of
the defining Great Work of Rhea A.
White, they are most frequently
referred to as Exceptional Human
Experiences /
EHEs. These powerful, 'realer than real' moments can be as
instantly reorienting as a magnet is to iron filings. And yet, at the same
time, they may take some
earnest work to integrate their implications into one's life. So
these events invariably invoke a continual flow of working through and
adapting toward the purpose of living more fully out of one's
Experience/s that may last through the remainder of one's life, to which
White refers as the EHE
Process.
Not only do they affect the experiencer, but their stories can have a
like influence on nonexperiencers' lives as well.
Near-death-experience / NDE researcher
Kenneth Ring uses the analogy of a benign virus that can be quite
"contagious." White, by the way has composed a
list of over 500 types
of exceptional experiences.
Since the 1960s, when people [[see "NOTE" below]] almost
never talked about these things, and did not admit to having had such
experiences, there has been a
phenomenal upsurge of these occurrences [as events and as reports of
events] and of our in-common familiarity with experiences of this
nature all over the world.
By 1980, both Raymond
Moody and
also Elisabeth
Kübler Ross
had effectively captivated the attentions of the popular media,
including the interests of numerous healthcare professionals and
scientists, at which point people were much more aware but still
rarely sharing their own Experiences.
Up until roughly 20 years ago [circa 1990], there was still a strong
fear of being thought to be, and occasionally diagnosed as being,
mentally ill if one openly admitted having an EE
/ EHE
[exceptional or exceptional human experience, by whatever name; see
first paragraph above]. Or even assumed to be telling
imaginative stories or lies. Suppose you disclose perhaps your most cherished and sacred experience to
another who then is very skeptical or dismissive, possibly wonders
silently or aloud about your sanity, or even derides or demeans
you for such a 'silly belief'. So even today, this
reticence, fear, and self protectiveness is sadly but understandably prevalent. We have
not created much in the way of the kinds of communal opportunities,
such as the former
EHE Network
[Rhea White's organization] fostered, that extend to the public a safe,
welcoming, yet ideologically neutral environment for this
purpose.
Another
precedent-setting example of this kind of support is the International
Association for Near Death Studies.
Even though its original focus was near-death experiences, it has
broadened its interests to include any transformative experiences
along these lines.
There
will soon be an additional option available through this web project
that will offer both local community and online opportunities,
something Rhea White long envisioned seeing manifest. To find
out more, see EHE
Study Groups.
Starting around 1980, every few years new survey results surfaced,
demonstrating how rapidly the veracity of these experiences was being
inculcated within various countries, including Australia, Japan,
Italy, Brazil, Great Britain and the US. For example, in 1980, highly regarded
public opinion polls in both Europe and the USA indicated that,
respectively, 46 and 60 percent of these populations acknowledged
having had some form of "spontaneous experiences" of the EHE
variety. Another major USA survey, several years later (1987),
asking if pollsters had had psychic experiences, reported 67% answered
to the affirmative.
In
1990
or thereabouts, the popular media became a powerful contributor toward
normalizing this understanding. Talk-show hosts [Oprah and David Letterman come to mind], occasional
movies [Closer to the Light -- about the first and very dramatic
near-death experience of Dannion Brinkley; Resurrection (..details?);
also the movie about the gifted medium James Van Praagh's life], TV
programs [Bill Moyers; John Edwards, and more recently .. ??] -- and a
deluge of books
by researchers and then by Experiencers, by this time, contributed greatly to bringing people
out of the closet to talk about and to begin sharing their experiences
with less reticence.
Notably, people who have had death-transcendent
types of EHEs
will often exclaim,
If there is one thing that can save our planet
and
save us from our destructive ignorance,
it is these
'inoculations
of immortality'. **
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The more
deeply affecting one's Experience is, the more fully is
this understanding implicit within it.
That's how powerful and eye-opening these experiences can be and in
the
highly universalistic way remarked again and again by Experiencers and
those who study them. It's as
if in each case, like a parent's first birthing experience, they had just discovered this for the first time, ever, which
of course they did -- for themselves. Again, this is one of the markers noted in the
aftereffects.
This nearly silent rEvolution [thus far] has affected so
many people in such a short time, a good portion of the EHEers and
even the researchers perceive this as a major consciousness shift that
will eventually alter the disposition of the majority or tipping point
of people on this planet. But one delaying factor, which
paradoxically also holds forth promise for snowballing into this developing
awareness sooner than later, is that a major portion of people who have had such
experiences have not known
how to value these events and so are momentarily in stasis.
I believe this will shift rapidly, once people have a better
understanding of their personal and universal significance, and this
can happen much more effectively if people have safe and appropriate
ways to become more open to sharing, writing, and processing their
experiences. This collective validation process will be a key
factor in the timely unfolding of this consciousness
shift.
Kind of like a delayed reaction
to a joke -- we've all experienced this; someone tells a funny story,
and at the time it just doesn't connect. It may take an extra
moment or a day, but suddenly you
get it and bust out laughing. In just this way a sizeable
number of potential EHEers, have yet to "get it" how extraordinary
their own such Experiences are. We must find ways to share them
with each other, many of us, to realize their pervasiveness and their
reality and importance.
The experience
is merely the seed. It has potential, but there is the process,
the planting and growing and nurturing that must ensue for this
realization to take hold. This "humanizing" life change comes into play
only with the Process of how we begin to make sense of the experience
and integrate it and its gifts into our lives, consciously work with
it, and allow it to deepen us into the
MORE we potentially all
are. As a result of millions and millions of people having these
Experiences, many of us are finally and with finality side-stepping the
question of belief altogether, to realize we can no longer imagine to
ignore, deny, or question the truth of this larger-life reality before
us.
Not everyone makes this internal transition as a result of direct
experience at first. Gary
Doore, author
of What Survives? Contemporary Explorations of Life After Death,
puts faith and skepticism into interesting perspective through
recounting the consciousness shift of someone who "got it"
not through direct experience, but through logical deduction.
This has happened to quite a few well-meaning people whose skepticism
bordered on irateness, imagining that innocent people were being duped
or were fooling themselves or were purposefully trying to con others
with these 'so-called spiritual experiences'. They set out with
determination to disprove this 'false premise' or 'fakery' once and for all, only to be themselves
won over, through the overwhelm of the sheer abundance
of examples and evidence, once they took the time to really
look. In his book, to this day, one of the most informative
books about NDEs [published in 1990], Doore reports,
Most people assume that belief in an afterlife is strictly a matter
of faith. A few may have heard of scientific investigations of
reported contacts with deceased persons made through
"mediums" at spiritualistic seances; if so, however, they
have probably dismissed such reports as instances of fraud or
self-delusion. Fewer still are familiar with the great mass of
evidence that has been steadily accumulating since the first
psychical researchers in England began their investigations into
spiritualistic phenomena at the turn of this [20th] century.
Colin
Wilson, the well-known British writer, is one of the few people who
is thoroughly familiar with this evidence. An essay by Wilson ...
describes his own introduction to the facts in the case for survival
and how he was gradually converted from skepticism to belief by the
sheer weight of the evidence. "A skeptic can usually find some
loophole in the most well-authenticated accounts," writes
Wilson. "Yet when we read perhaps a hundred accounts, all of
which seem to point to the same conclusion, it becomes very hard to
feel so certain that they all amount to self-deception or willful
mendacity." After presenting some of the most fascinating and
compelling cases encountered in his own research for several books,
Wilson observes that in his estimation the overall case for survival
is so strong that "it would be rather perverse to go on
thinking up objections."
Our awareness is expanding. The veils are being
lifted in a way similar to what happened when the discoveries of
Copernicus, Kepner, Bruno, and Galileo effectively deconstructed the idea of a
"flat earth" that was also supposed to be the
center-of-the-universe. The old ways of thinking and believing
soon become like yesterday's news -- like, who cares? And we
simply take up the new -- of course having gone through some earnest
processing to get there! In the astronomy example, for his part,
Giuardono Bruno
was murdered by the Church. One result of that was that Galileo
delayed for quite some time the publication of his main ideas until
about or after the time of his own passing, to circumvent the likelihood
of a similarly tortured demise. Times have changed.
Hopefully no more stake burnings. We just have to respect each
other's very personal journey. We will ultimately all arrive
at the same destination.
We could say there are two integral parts to the requisite consciousness-raising that culminate in this personal and collective
Shift. The first shift belongs to the individual, whatever it
takes to process the EHE-type of experience within. The other
is the cultivation of our collective awareness, a mutual validation
and heads-up that these momentous encounters with the Ineffable are
genuine and quite normal, that many, many
people have had such experiences, that the events / processing can
and do change people's lives in very meaningful and important ways
that benefit all of us and our world.
What
we are learning together is that we as the entire Human race are
Waking Up to a whole new level of awareness, including super- or subtle-sensing
abilities that extend beyond the old consensus of the five-sensory
world. Shattering and thrilling. Often
Experiencers come back from their encounters with the recognition that
all of Humanity will eventually come to this understanding and
conscious awareness as the new consensus reality.
One person, John
White, an EHEer / Experiencer and a consciousness studies pioneer who, along with Edgar
D. Mitchell, co-founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences / IONS, perceives this
'turning point in time' as an evolutionary leap in which a whole new
human species is being born here in our midst, within us, all around
us, and because people typically as of yet do not talk openly about
this, most of us aren't remotely aware! His name for this new
species is Homo
Noeticus.
Interestingly,
David Spangler got the same message [circa 1970] but in a different
way. It helps to see the same ideas expressed in varying ways,
which is also validating. David was speaking for a nonphysical Being of whom
he was directly aware, who identified itself as what we might call "Limitless Love and
Truth," who said,
The
Choice is not between forms but between consciousnesses.
The
identity of this world is one in which humanity confronts itself as
a divine being and takes on with wisdom and with skill, in wholeness
and in love the truth of its identity as co-creator with God. ...
What this new world shall be like will be discovered and enunciated
by many men and women throughout the world, whose voices will grow
to become one voice as they recognize their oneness.
--
NOTE:
When I speak in these generic terms, I refer to the USA and imply as
well societies that share similar values, based predominantly on the
modern, materialistic, Western science purview.
Simultaneously, I do so with apologies to those of you within these
populations, as well as other cultures for whom exceptional
and exceptional human experiences
have great meaning and value, no matter what they may be
called -- "spiritual experiences" and spiritually
transformative experiences,
paranormal or anomalous experiences, for example.
*
"Psychic experiences in the Multi-National Human Values Study:
Who reports them?" by E. Haraldsson and J. M. Houtkooper
(1991), IN: Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research,
v. 85, pp. 15-165. Notation in Rhea A. White's journal, EHE,
Background Papers, EHE Network, Dix Hills, NY, 1994.)
**
Mysticism Goes Mainstream, by Andrew M. Greeley, IN American
Health, v. 6, pp. 47-49, January-February, 1987.
Notation in Rhea A. White's journal, EHE, Background Papers, EHE
Network, Dix Hills, NY, 1994.)
***
"Inoculations of immortality" -- i.e., death-transcendent
experiences.
Thank you, Anya
Foos-Graber
for this delightful phrase!
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